Gearbox's Pitchford: Borderlands 2 comparable to Diablo 3

According to Pitchford in an interview with IGN, he's a Mage in Diablo III but is "definitely going to also play as a Barbarian". He wants to "chop dudes up with melee weapons instead of casting fireballs."

“That changes the whole nature of the experience. There’s a lot of people that play Borderlands like that, as a hobby. Adding characters is more for those kinds of gamers.” said Pitchford.

He then discussed the difficulty of introducing a new class, in this case the Mechromancer DLC. “It’s not like some games, where you create a couple of chapters where I can play as this character. We’re making a character class so it works for the whole game. You can go and play the entire game as this character, and you can play with any of the other characters in co-op. It has to be balanced,” he explained, adding, “There’s a lot of design complexity to do that. But we really wanted to try it, we wanted to push ourselves, because if we can figure that out, we think that’s awesome.”

Pitchford went on to broadly hint that the Mechromancer wasn't the last downloadable class, either, and that even more DLC will be coming to Borderlands 2 than there was in the original.

“We’ll probably want to be adding more characters. With Borderlands 1, we did four DLCs, and they killed. We had a lot of fun making them,” he said.

“Right now, we have a lot of momentum. There’s still a lot of energy and love from a development and talent point of view. There’s a lot of folks who want to do stuff and have ideas about things we can do, having finished the game. We created hooks in the game that allow us to add characters as patches, as DLC. There’s no technical reason why we couldn’t do more,” Pitchford concluded.